


Sweet Dreams, Timaeus

by whistleafblower



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Depression, Epilogues Whomst'd've I Don't Know Them, Gen, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Scars, Suicidal Thoughts, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:54:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23761156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whistleafblower/pseuds/whistleafblower
Summary: Dirk's never gotten much sleep even before the game, but this is getting ridiculous.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Sweet Dreams, Timaeus

**Author's Note:**

> This ain't as graphic as the tags suggest it is. Yet, all the things mentioned in them do make an appearance.

Dirk hurtles into consciousness and sits up like a shot.

He finds himself instinctively reaching for a sword that's no longer next to his bed since the last incident and only ceases flailing around once he realizes that there is no real threat to his wellbeing requiring a sword, bar possibly his own shitbag brain, but he promised he'd cut out that kind of thinking.

The room is dark, but his vision adjusts quickly enough. It's somewhere around 3, judging by the clock he can make out on the opposite wall, and he flops back down onto the mattress, trying his best to calm himself, to relax into the night. It's definitely going to be a long one, by the looks of it. 

These nightmares have been plaguing him since he came to Earth C all those years ago, when the game ended. Even categorizing them as simple nightmares seems unfitting. He thinks of them as random tests his brain sends out to see if it'll receive any kind of feedback, to make sure his stress responses are still online even though the threat is no longer real.  
They're nothing he can put his finger on – he can't recall any recognizable figures, any terrible event in particular, just a vague sense of dread and foreboding that builds and builds and builds until it explodes, resulting in anything from screaming so loud and long that he's convinced Jane can hear him all the way from her house, to moments like these where he simply finds himself awake and aware, trying to get his hyperventilating under control.

Pathetic, really, but he'll allow himself a moment of weakness here. It's not like anyone's here to witness it.

He runs his hands over his face to steady himself some more and keeps them there for a moment, breath coming in whistles through the small gaps between his fingers. There may or may not be a stray tear of frustration coming down the side of his face, finding its resting place in the hair at his temple. 

On nights like this he'd usually get up, get himself a glass of water and force himself to gulp it down, all the while leaning on the kitchen counter and hoping the trembles subside soon enough. He'd focus on the cold tiles beneath his bare feet and do a mental count of his friends' current whereabouts, his to-do list for tomorrow, the projects he has going on, and other things he is sure of and possesses firm control over. He'd wrap his arms around himself and go through these mental checklists item by item, and sway his upper body back and forth just imperceptibly so, like a reed in the summer breeze, just to make sure that the fine shaking of his muscles buzzing away at him right beneath his skin doesn't swallow him whole.

He'd do this ritual until he feels steady enough on his feet, consider if the night is forfeit (most of the time deciding that yes, indeed, it is), and pad over to the bathroom to start the shower.

This time, he's not going to do any of that.

Tonight is the seventh night in a row that he's waking up like this, and he doesn't have it in him to even roll over in bed, let alone get all the way over to the kitchen. Realistically, it's only about 12 steps. To him, might as well be all the way to what's left of his Earth and back. 

He used to hate the ocean, the salty, briny smell that never left his nostrils and seemed to permeate every surface in his apartment, leaving nothing sacred and untouched in its wake. He used to hate the seagulls' constant screeching and the way the cacophony would only quiet down in the wee hours of the night, only furthering his already rampant sleeping problems and furthering him away from even the thought of forming a solid sleep schedule. (It's okay, I'll sleep when I'm dead anyway, Dirk used to think to himself in the nights that the seagulls would be up unusually late, not knowing yet that even that was a lie he told himself for cold comfort)

Now that he thinks about it, he kind of misses the ocean. The omnipresent white noise machine would never leave him utterly alone like he feels right now, always humming and whispering against the scaffolding supporting his apartment, reminding me that there is still teeming life on all sides even though he can't think of any human close enough to him to reach out to in moments like this. Now, all that greets him outside his high-rise’s window is dead fucking silence, and he's growing to hate that too.

Maybe it would be ironic if he made himself an actual noise machine and programmed it to make soft ocean noises. Maybe it would be too painful. Maybe it would remind him of home, or it would serve as the final nail in the coffin of insanity that he was slowly cobbling together with boards made of nights like this one. It sure would be poetic justice if he went absolutely batshit after all he's been through and all he's done to earn his happy ending.

Fuck that, Dirk thinks to himself. People like you don't deserve happy endings.

He turns his head only a fraction to the left to look at the window from the corner of his eye. The night sky, filled with stars of various sizes, shines through so clear you could see just about every corner of the universe if you focused. Now, that's a common parallel between his home and this landlocked mess he lives in right now. Dirk thinks fondly of the times when he used to lay on his back on the still-warm gravel of the rooftop in nothing but a shirt and his underwear and just stargaze, trying to catch the constellations he read about on the Internet in one of his legendary Wikipedia binges. There goes Cassiopeia, there's little Ursa Minor peeking in, and oh, look, the great Aquila, watching over the skies, and if he wanted to provide himself some comfort from a snap of loneliness, watching over him as well. His head supported by his arms crossed right below it, he could get lost in it as in any other mostly intellectual activity, and he could find himself making up new constellations – Petasus, The Hat; or Aurantium, The Great Orange – until he fell asleep.

He thinks less fondly of the really bad nights, when he'd climb up to his roof and stand at the edge, stare down the ocean below and calculate how he needs to place his body in relation to the water in order to make quick work of himself, thoughts running fast and untethered to his consciousness and wild, wild, wild-

He jerks his head sharply back into its previous position and presses his fingers hard into his eyes.

Hell no. He promised his friends when they came here that he'd do his best to be okay, that he'd submit to all the checking-on and the questions and that he'd make sure to not worry them. They don't know about what goes on in his bedroom when he's alone in the wee hours of the morning and they sure as hell aren't about to find out. It would just worry them all unnecessarily. Times like this sure make him miss his auto-responder, who he's sure would be a decent listening ear when brain-trouble comes knockin', but who he's not sure wouldn't be ribbing him to death about still going through shit like this even though things are supposed to be picture-fucking-perfect now. 

Yeah, on second thought, he'll take the silence. His actual head never runs out of juice, anyway.

Feeling a bit safer from the shittier thoughts that sit in between the folds of his grey matter, he finally drops his hands from his face and feels immeasurable relief when he rests them on the bed, which he still finds too soft and too quiet compared to his old mattress. Back in his old place, the high humidity rusted out the box spring in both mattresses, so every time he turned or breathed too deeply or did anything on it, it would sing him the song of its people, whines and groans in various tones. Being constantly on high alert and having a noisy mattress do not blend well together, so he realized very early on that he'd need to either start sleeping on the floor or train himself to move as little as possible. Even now that there's no need for that, on the nights when he sleeps for at least five consecutive hours (which are getting few and far between, to Dirk's great displeasure), he wakes up feeling like his joints have somehow gotten welded together, and needing to stretch for a solid fifteen minutes just to lift his ass out of bed. 

Maybe increasing his training load would help matters – maybe setting up regular sparring matches with Sawtooth might help loosen him up, take care of the need to train and the need to fight something, and maybe if he was very, very lucky, it would tucker him out enough to bump up the total number of hours he spends asleep in a week. Hell, he'd spar with anyone and anything if it would make the shadows beneath his eyes recede just enough to make him stop flinching at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He really looks like he's falling apart at the seams. Too bad he's not a puppet he can just redo the stitching on and call it a day; he's still flesh and blood even with God Tier energy running electric through his circulatory system. An organic mechanic he is not, sadly, and he's got enough common sense to know that the only thing that will help matters at this point is getting some god damn sleep.

Not tonight, Strider.

He's still feeling like he's floating on the wrong edge of reality, so he makes the herculean effort of moving his arms from where he was resting them by his sides and ghosting his callused fingertips along his skin in a pattern he knows well by now - whenever he found himself feeling the rift of disconnect between himself and the real world around him, he felt around for his scars. 

Not all of them were serious, he was careful not to do anything that could cause the kind of damage that would test out how well one of his bots was programmed to perform emergency surgery (or worse, how capable he was on performing it on himself in the event that no one else could step up to the task), but he still had more than his share. 

Various marks in shape and size litter his body, and a ghost of a smile flits across his face as he recalls the one he got on his forehead when he, as a child, fought a particularly rambunctious seagull for the lunch he was eating at the time. The smell of food must have alerted the bird to easier prey being obtainable soon, and he gave it his best shot at wrenching his meal from the bird's iron grip, but it only came closer and began pecking at his face in effort to make him relinquish it first. His scalp got the brunt of it, due to some clever dodging. A well placed loud squawk from Dirk startled the bird into temporarily ceasing its assault and gave him leverage to pull harder, marking him the winner of the battle. The bird retreated in shame, and he ate the rest of his lunch in a rush.

When he noticed his eye was burning from a droplet of something getting into it, he pushed up one side of his shades in a swift movement to wipe his eye from what he thought was sweat since he was on the roof in the sizzling heat. When his hand came back red, he gasped and retreated straight into his apartment to assess the damage as fast as his tiny feet would carry him, tripping once and falling into his living space, but scrambling up just as fast to get into the bathroom.

While his face did look pretty bad, he stamped down on his panic as best as he could and washed off the blood. Red swirled into the sink along with the water and when he turned up his gaze to the mirror again, he was relieved to see that the blood was coming from a relatively small wound near his hairline where the seagull had pecked him. It didn't need stitches, and healed into a keloid bump, but he rationalized it as one of his first battle scars, and thus something cool and to be revered with quiet awe the next time he goes to style his hair.

It may have been one of his first, but nowhere near the last. Peppered all over his body were nicks and scrapes he got from, among other things, not exercising as much caution as he should while sparring with his bots or performing maintenance on them. Mechanical love bites he got on his fingers when he slipped one way too near a sharp edge of metal plating he still hadn't worked over completely, small electrical burns that healed wrong from when wiring would short out while he was still holding it, mementos from unfortunate encounters with a welding torch...

One of his favourites was when a weaponized sylladex item bounced off of Squarewave and slammed into his face, giving him a follow-up to the previous time something went after his head and lived to tell the tale. He still crushed that rap battle, though.

There were the ones from swords and other weaponry catching him in the middle of a real spar, and he recalls the time he sat on the tiled floor of his bathroom and held his breath as he threaded a curved needle through the skin on his thigh – only a surface cut, but still deep enough that it had required him to administer stitches. A sock in his mouth muffled the keening noises he made and he whistled through his nose as it went in over and over again. If he did cry a little bit, no one was there to witness it. He made sure to keep his shades in the adjacent room while he fixed his own sorry ass up.

Many more followed suit, caused by dumb accidents he's too tired to recall.

The do-over effect from their express upgrade to God status didn't do much in the department of scar removal - Jake still had all his marks from adventures long past, Dave still wore his sleeves long, and he still looked every part of the boy who raised himself all alone in the middle of the ocean, dangerous hobbies and all.  
The phantom scarring on his neck from the many times he had his head taken off comes last. He can almost feel the bumps of it if he focuses hard enough, almost see it in the mirror shining white and rubbery when he's particularly sleep deprived. 

The sun has begun to rise and he's more than awake now. He can hear chirping from the outside – some species of bird he still hasn't acquainted himself with. Add that to the to-do list for tomorrow, can't miss out on getting to know his environment fully if he's going to be staying here (and by the looks of it, he will, this seems to be his and his friends' forever home and he has to start making his nest more comfortable, fast). Dirk groans to himself quietly, and sits up a little slower than he did when he first woke up. 

Shades on, he walks over to the window and perches on the sill to watch the sunrise.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a very self indulgent piece written at 4 AM to ease my own anxiety over having nightmares, and since Dirk has always been my favourite and the character I relate to the most, it seems only right to take it out on him. Poor fucker.
> 
> I do not recognize the existence of the Epilogues proper in this story, because I really wasn't happy with them and there's no use trying to include already dubiously canon and less dubiously personally disliked content in a story I wrote to vent. Either way, loving this, should be doing it more often, might write more. <3


End file.
